Rate video

Description

Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack’s nonfiction treatise Crude Awakening joins Maxed Out, An Inconvenient Truth,
and other recent documentaries devoted to unearthing and exploring
forces that are untying the connective threads of contemporary society.
The subject at hand is crude oil – specifically, the depletion of
petroleum from the Earth, in an era when consumption threatens to exceed
supply.

The overtone of the film is speculative
but admonitory; Gelpke and McCormack suggest that if western society
fails to reinvent itself altogether (via such innovations as
hydrogen-powered autos, and a decreased reliance on fiscally unsound
Middle Eastern nations), economic cataclysm is not simply likely but
inevitable.

To underscore this point, the
filmmakers contrast obscenely naïve shorts from the 1950s that promise
depthless oil supplies, with contemporary warnings from geologists who
suggest that the bottom of the well is close at hand. McCormack and
Gelpke also interview such subjects as former OPEC secretary general
Fadhil Chalabi and Bush advisor Roger E. Ebel.